This week on The Movie Gourmet – the relentlessly entertaining French epic The Count of Monte-Cristo, the insightful documentary John Singer Sargent: Fashion and Swagger and the classic film noir Sudden Fear, with its nearly perfect final twelve minutes.
The surprisingly uplifting documentary Matter of Mind: My Parkinson’s shines a light on Parkinson’s disease, and what we need to know about it. An estimated one million Americans are living with Parkinson’s, and the key to Matter of Mind’s success is in introducing us to three of them – a Brooklyn optician, a San Francisco fitness trainer and an Alaskan cartoonist – and their families. All three films in the Matter of Mind trilogy, including My ALS and My Alzheimer’s will be available to stream between May 15 to June 3, 2025.
I am looking forward to Matt Wolf’s HBO biodoc Pee Wee Herman as Himself, which begins airing on the weekend after next. The week after, theaters will offer Caught by the Tides, from the Chinese master filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke and his muse and leading lady Tao Zhao and the buzzed-about The Life of Chuck.
Note: I recommended the highly innovative The Accident after screening it for the 2024 Slamdance, and it’s now streaming on Fandor. The Accident went on to win the Narrative Feature Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance.
CURRENT MOVIES
- We Want the Funk: Tear the Roof Off the Sucker. PBS.
- The Count of Monte-Cristo: you think you’ve seen a revenge movie? kanopy (free), Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
- Thank You Very Much: provocateur explained. Amazon, AppleTV.
- Art for Everybody: a contradiction revealed. Rolling out in theaters.
- Matter of Mind: My Parkinson’s: real, uplifting, essential. PBS and the PBS YouTube channel.
- John Singer Sargent: Fashion and Swagger: locking gazes. kanopy.
- The Trouble with Jessica: a diverting farce. In theaters.
- Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius): rise, fall and legacy of a groundbreaking prodigy. Hulu.
- Bob Trevino Likes It: without dad’s encouragement, she’s stuck. In theaters.
ON TV
Tomorrow night, May 17, Turner Classic Movies is airing a great and underappreciated film, the French film noir Touchez pas au grisbi on its Noir Alley with intro and outro by the czar of noir, Eddie Muller. A seasoned and very, very cool gangster (Jean Gabin) has hidden a massive haul of stolen gold bullion as his retirement fund. The gold is from a notorious heist that he has never acknowledged masterminding, and the movie’s title translates as “don’t touch the loot”. He has kept his secret with remarkable discipline and cleverness, but his longtime partner may become the weak link.
Probably the greatest male French movie star ever, Jean Gabin had dominated prewar French cinema, and, after the war, he aged into noir and, in the 1960s, into neo-noir. Gabin oozed a seasoned cool (like Humphrey Bogart) and imparted a stately gravitas to his noir and neo-noir characters. Jean Gabin is on my very short list of the most perpetually cool humans to ever walk the planet, along with Dean Martin, Ben Gazzara, Joan Jett and Barack Obama.
Jeanne Moreau appears in an early role. So does that most watchable of French stars, Lino Ventura, whose bloodhound face had been reshaped by his earlier careers as a professional wrestler and boxer. Touchez pas au grisbi is one of my top five film noirs and one of my top fifty movies of all time.